Thursday, June 6, 2013

SharePoint designer 2013, designer tool for SharePoint 2013.
We can see some major changes in SharePoint designer 2010 to SharePoint
designer 2013. Following are the few changes,

No visual design:The split view design (on the bottom) is
no longer available in SharePoint designer 2013. Compared to the current
versions of IE, design view is an older technology that does not support many
of new HTML5 and CSS tags. I hope this will cause some problems by removing the
design view for few scenarios like editing aspx pages and creating Data View
webparts. Sometimes it will become harder to edit the page design.

Platform dependent: SharePoint 2013 allows us to create
platform dependent workflows. While creating new workflow, with name and
description we will have option to select the platform type. Here we can select
SharePoint 2010 workflow or SharePoint 2013 workflow.

Following are the
workflow enhancements in SharePoint designer 2013.

Copy- Paste workflow steps:Through this feature we can have
the option to Copy-Paste the workflow steps, means we can copy (Ctrl-C) the workflow
steps, loops, conditions, actions and Paste (Ctrl-v) them in the workflow.

After creating the workflow, we can copy the workflow steps
and paste them as shown in the image below. But Paste as text option will not work.

But it will work for only few things. Suppose think a case
that having look-up columns. Copy paste
will work but it will give error while running. (it will not show any errors,
by clicking on the “Check for Errors” button or “Publish” buttons)

Following are the few cases that not supporting Copy – paste:

No support for Undo (Ctrl-z)

We cannot copy – paste different workflow platform types. If
we try for it we’ll get the errors as following.

We cannot select multiple items with dragging.

We cannot copy the workflows across different RDP’s. We can
copy paste the steps but it won’t work because there is no support for across
different designers with different PIDs.

Call External web services from workflow: We have new option
“Call Web Service” to get the data from external or internal web service.

Loops in workflows: In SharePoint 2010 workflows are not
used to support loops. In SharePoint 2013 designer supports “Loops”. Loops are
fully integrated action which we can use with in all 2013 workflows.

Dictionary type Variables: In SharePoint 2013, we have new
variables has been introduced to hold an array values. There are three actions
designed for Dictionary type variables, Build dictionary, Count Items in a
dictionary, Get an Item from a Dictionary.

New Task Actions: New task actions are added into the task
actions. Assign a task and Start a Task Process are added to assign a task to a
user and assign multiple tasks to multiple users.

Visual designer: Through SharePoint designer we can create
workflows visually that avoids coding. So that complexity will be reduced. We
can do this in SharePoint designer through visual designer. Visio designer is
included with SharePoint designer. We can see it if we install Visio in our machine.
To check visual workflow designer we must install Visio 2013 and Windows Azure
workflow. We can see the installation guide here.

Windows Workflow Foundation 3.0 are deprecated: Some
features of SharePoint 2010 workflow platform that depends on Windows workflow
foundation 3.0 are deprecated in SharePoint 2013. The reason is new SharePoint
WF’s are built up on WWF 4.5 and it is not integrated with Workflow Manager 1.0

Improved Email Editor: We have easier to format workflow
email messages by using a standard formatting toolbar to the workflow email
editor.

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About Me

Having good experience in SharePoint 2007/2010 and .net applications. Currently, working on SharePoint 2013 and training people on SharePoint. Microsoft certified technology specialist, Microsoft Certified Professional developer in SharePoint 2010.